Ceph Placeholder Volumes during preseed

Thank you in advance. I am currently working on stand up a Incus Cluster with Ceph. I can get the initial node up, but when standing up the remaining nodes I get the following errors as seen in first code block. What would be the proper way to configure this?

❯ cat alfheimr.yaml|incus admin init --preseed
Error: Failed to join cluster: Failed to initialize member: Failed to initialize storage pools and networks: Failed to create storage pool "brospan-yggdrasil": Placeholder volume does not exist
storage_pools:
  # Spektrum - High-performance VM storage
  - name: spektrum-yggdrasil
    driver: ceph
    description: "Spektrum - Norse VM storage pool (high performance)"
    config:
      source: spektrum-yggdrasil                 
      ceph.cluster_name: ceph
      ceph.osd.pg_num: 64
      volume.block.filesystem: xfs
      volume.block.mount_options: discard
      # High-performance Ceph features
      ceph.rbd.features: layering,exclusive-lock,object-map,fast-diff

  # Prisma - Optimized container storage
  - name: prisma-yggdrasil
    driver: ceph
    description: "Prisma - Norse container storage pool (optimized I/O)"
    config:
      source: prisma-yggdrasil              
      ceph.cluster_name: ceph
      ceph.osd.pg_num: 32
      # Volume defaults optimized for containers
      volume.size: 10GiB                      # Standard container size
      volume.block.filesystem: xfs
      volume.block.mount_options: discard
      # Container-optimized features
      ceph.rbd.features: layering,exclusive-lock,object-map,fast-diff

  # Fundament - Backup storage with compression
  - name: fundament-yggdrasil
    driver: ceph
    description: "Fundament - Norse backup storage pool (compressed)"
    config:
      source: fundament-yggdrasil             
      ceph.cluster_name: ceph
      ceph.osd.pg_num: 16
      volume.block.filesystem: xfs
      volume.block.mount_options: discard
      # Basic features for backup storage
      ceph.rbd.features: layering,exclusive-lock

  - name: brospan-yggdrasil
    driver: ceph
    description: "Brospan - Norse general storage pool (S3 buckets)"
    config:
      source: brospan-yggdrasil          
      ceph.cluster_name: ceph
      ceph.osd.pg_num: 32
      volume.block.filesystem: xfs
      volume.block.mount_options: discard
      # Standard features
      ceph.rbd.features: layering,exclusive-lock,object-map,fast-diff
  - name: ljusbro-fs
    driver: cephfs
    description: "Ljusbro - Norse CephFS distributed filesystem (World Tree)"
    config:
      source: ljusbro/volumes/yggdrasil

Second Node:
I have tried a couple of different variations of below.

  member_config:
  - entity: storage-pool
    name: spektrum-yggdrasil
    key: source
    value: ""
  - entity: storage-pool
    name: prisma-yggdrasil
    key: source
    value: ""
  - entity: storage-pool
    name: fundament-yggdrasil
    key: source
    value: ""
  - entity: storage-pool
    name: brospan-yggdrasil
    key: source
    value: ""
  - entity: storage-pool
    name: ljusbro-fs
    key: source
    value: ""

What does rbd ls brospan-yggdrasil show you on the server that you’re joining?

Wow, i dont know how i missed that thank you. Was missing the ceph.conf

root in /home/eminent
❯ rbd ls brospan-yggdrasil
did not load config file, using default settings.
2025-07-30T13:35:09.268-0400 7fb2ba013a40 -1 Errors while parsing config file!
2025-07-30T13:35:09.268-0400 7fb2ba013a40 -1 can't open ceph.conf: (2) No such file or directory
2025-07-30T13:35:09.268-0400 7fb2ba013a40 -1 Errors while parsing config file!
2025-07-30T13:35:09.268-0400 7fb2ba013a40 -1 can't open ceph.conf: (2) No such file or directory
unable to get monitor info from DNS SRV with service name: ceph-mon
rbd: couldn't connect to the cluster!
rbd: listing images failed: (2) No such file or directory
2025-07-30T13:35:09.269-0400 7fb2ba013a40 -1 failed for service _ceph-mon._tcp
2025-07-30T13:35:09.269-0400 7fb2ba013a40 -1 monclient: get_monmap_and_config cannot identify monitors to contact

Oh, that’d certainly explain why Incus can’t find the volume :wink: